Christian Zander/NurPhoto via AP Photos
Community members hold a rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on December 8, 2025, in response to recent federal rhetoric and policy actions affecting Somali and Afghan residents.
The streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota, once again filled with barricades in January after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed community activist Renée Nicole Macklin Good in front of witnesses and several cameras. Thousands of people came out to protest, in the Twin Cities and around the country, demanding justice for Good and an end to ICE’s ongoing reign of terror.
The sweeps in Minnesota—dubbed “Operation Metro Surge”—came on the heels of a racist rant by U.S. President Donald Trump against Somali immigrants, in which Trump said the United States would “go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” and that “their country is no good for a reason.” But the death of Good, and the nationwide protests in response, are a stark reminder to all who are paying attention that Trumpian violence will not be contained by the false borders of race or immigration status. Good and her wife stopped to bear witness to ICE activity and to protect their neighbors, acting on the old labor maxim that “an injury to one is an injury to all.”
It is a principle that Twin Cities community organizers like Said Mohamed embody every day in their work. Mohamed is a ride-share driver and the descendant of immigrants from Somalia. He’s been part of organizing Uber and Lyft drivers in the area for four years and is a member of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). So when he was pulled over by ICE agents, he hit record on his phone and asked the agents why they had stopped him. The agents demanded his driver’s license and denied that they had pulled him over because he looked Somali. SEIU publicized the video he recorded, noting that the officers were masked and riding in unmarked cars.
Mohamed was released and returned to his organizing work, but many others have not been so lucky. The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota has filed a lawsuit on behalf of several Minnesotans, accusing ICE of violating their First and Fourth Amendment rights, harassing people documenting enforcement activity, and detaining U.S. citizens.
Trump, of course, does not acknowledge that the reason the United States has been a destination for refugees from the East African country is this nation’s ongoing involvement in destabilizing the region. Somali immigrants were granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the United States in 1991. Trump announced in November that he planned to end it. (Somalia was also included in the latest version of Trump’s travel ban, announced last June.) In January, it was announced that TPS for Somalis would end in March. The United States has been involved militarily in Somalia off and on since the early 1990s, and continuously since 2007, in what The Intercept’s Nick Turse called “America’s longest-running war.” Since resuming office in 2025, Trump has drone strikes in that country. What’s more, the United States has known its campaigns in Somalia have been a mess; a 2007 report by the Institute for Defense Analyses obtained by The Intercept found, according to Turse, that “America’s nascent war in the Horn of Africa was plagued by a failure to define the parameters of the conflict or its aims.” Turse added, “After more than twenty years of U.S. efforts, the Pentagon’s own metrics show that America’s war in the region was never effectively prosecuted, remains in a stalemate or worse, and has been especially ruinous for Somalis.”
Trump’s obsession with Somalia seems to have more to do with domestic politics than any foreign strategy, and specifically with one of his loudest critics, U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota. “I always watch her,” Trump said in the same rant in which he denounced Somalis more generally. Omar, who came to the United States as a refugee when she was twelve, said she has carried her passport with her at all times since Trump’s first election in 2016. She told reporters recently that her own twenty-year-old son was stopped during the ICE surge in Minnesota. When ICE denied it, Omar replied, “If they are documenting the stops, maybe with video, we would love for them to share that information. If their denial is based on documentation they have, why are they denying members of Congress that information?”
Omar isn’t the only Somali elected official from Minnesota on the minds of Trump Administration officials. Vice President J.D. Vance snarked about the Democratic state senator of Minnesota, Omar Fateh, in a speech on December 21. Fateh, who has been compared to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani because of his democratic socialist politics and social movement backing, came in second in a crowded contest for Minneapolis mayor last fall.
But it’s not just the big-name elected officials who have drawn attention to Minnesota’s Somali community. While Trump has honed in on a fraud scandal involving COVID-19 benefits, it’s been workers like Mohamed who have helped lead labor and community organizing wins in the Twin Cities in recent years, including handing rare defeats to giants Amazon and Uber.
I first spoke to Mohamed Mire during the pandemic lockdown, when he was working at an Amazon distribution center outside of Minneapolis. Mire arrived in the United States in the early 1990s, living first in Nashville, Tennessee, where he worked as a taxi driver, before moving to Minnesota in 2017. Amazon recruited workers specifically from the Somali community, and the work was grueling. “When the Amazon customer receives their package,” Mire told me back then, “they should appreciate that everyone working at Amazon [donates] their blood, because they’re working like never before.”
Mire became a member of the Awood Center, a worker-led organization based in the Twin Cities’s East African community. Awood is the Somali word for “power,” and the center managed to get Amazon to negotiate with workers years before the Amazon Labor Union’s win in New York City in 2022. The Minnesota workers used wildcat strikes, walkouts, and broader community organizing; they focused on working conditions, but also on space and time for prayer for observant Muslim workers. For far too long, the U.S. labor movement considered workers like Mire “unorganizable,” but it was those very culturally specific demands that actually produced tangible wins—victories that also helped non-Muslim, non-Somali workers like Tyler Hamilton, who had organized alongside Mire at Amazon. They also shepherded a statewide bill for warehouse worker safety, requiring Amazon and other companies to make public the quotas they enforce on workers, as well as investigations of their injury rates. “The people who are directly impacted by problems and issues will usually have some of the best insight for how to mitigate those, how to fix them,” Hamilton told me in 2021.
Companies like Amazon “take advantage of the Middle East, Somali people, and the Africans,” Mire told me in 2023, when we spoke again. “And those immigrant people, they make Amazon great. That’s how they make money. Blood from the newcomers.” Those newcomers made it to the covers of Wired magazine and The New York Times because of their struggles. Rereading the ending of that Wired feature story feels particularly ominous now: “Amazon, in other words, is not the only one watching a few Somalis very closely.”
Amazon fought back, closing the Shakopee distribution center in 2023 and scattering the workers. But, as Twin Cities organizer Cat Salonek once told me, the workers scattered like dandelion seeds, taking root in new workplaces, where they continued to organize.
Mire became an Uber driver, switching from one algorithmically managed workplace to another. At Uber, Mire and Mohamed and the other drivers are classified as independent contractors, but, as geographer Dalia Gebrial wrote, that label masks old systems of racialization, casting the workers aside the minute they are not needed. In an echo of the Amazon campaign, they’ve demanded space and time for prayer at the airport for drivers, and held public prayer in the airport’s cellphone lot.
After much back-and-forth, and a threat by Uber to leave Minneapolis entirely, those workers managed to get an ordinance passed requiring minimum pay rates and improved conditions for drivers using the apps. Fateh authored the state bill, but it was the organizing by workers that pushed it across the finish line, after a veto by Democratic Governor and former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz.
Somali immigrants had been central to the Twin Cities’s movement for Black lives, organized around the killings of Jamar Clark and Philando Castile in 2015 and 2016, respectively—Castile’s recorded death sprang to mind when I watched Said Mohamed’s video of his own traffic stop—and George Floyd in 2020. Workers of Somali descent organized at the airport, fought for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, and walked picket lines as teachers, janitors, and public servants. Awood, a cornerstone of the Twin Cities labor community’s radical ecology, has been central to what many now call the “Minnesota Model” of organizing. “By doing that hard work of coordination across those sectors, across those unions, across community and labor,” Greg Nammacher of SEIU Local 26 told me in 2024, “we can really achieve something that’s far more than if we were doing it by ourselves.”
That practice of deep solidarity is standing Minnesotans in good stead as Trump’s troops invade. Organizers who have been working together for more than a decade are well placed to welcome in new supporters; the energy on the street now benefits from rapid-fire decision-making and trust honed in the George Floyd rebellion. “We learn not to separate [issues] because our members are the ones who are struggling with housing, they are struggling with immigration, they are struggling with low incomes,” Brahim Kone, secretary-treasurer at Local 26 and himself an immigrant, told me. “You’re going to always find somebody who is fighting for something that we care about.”
That solidarity has shown up again in the days following Good’s death, as actions and vigils were held across the city. At the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, workers and community members gathered with a banner that read “Minnesotans Were Abducted Here.” As of this writing, the Department of Homeland Security claims to have detained more than 670 people in Minnesota, and at least six of those were UNITE HERE Local 17 members, taken from behind TSA lines at the airport. Organizers demanded an end to deportation flights, and protections for immigrant workers from elected officials, and have been doing rapid response work on the ground and in the streets. Before the holidays, activists sang rewritten Christmas carols inside of Target stores, demanding the company (headquartered in Minnesota) ban ICE from staging in its parking lots. They held a, with forty-five organizations as sponsors, through Minneapolis on December 20, despite sub-freezing temperatures.
Indeed, the adjustment to the kinds of traffic stops in which Said Mohamed was briefly snared comes because of community pushback to larger raids, like the one at Bro-Tex, a manufacturer in St. Paul, in November. “[L]arger operations are not effective because they get bogged down by the community asking for accountability,” Miguel Hernandez, of the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, told the Sahan Journal. “These smaller snatch-and-grab units can just disperse to grab and go quickly.”
It has been, after all, the cities with the most powerful radical communities that have drawn Trump’s ire and his troop invasions so far. Like Los Angeles and Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul is home to an immigrant community that has built roots and strong networks, and to organizers who are veterans of battles with militarized police. Even Trump’s newfound obsession with the Twin Cities’s East African residents should be viewed as an acknowledgement of their strength: The solidarity that is on display every day in workplaces and in the streets is, Mire told me more than once, a deep value for his community.
The last time I talked to Mire, his wife and children had just moved back to Somalia, and he had just visited that country for the first time since he’d left, thirty-two years earlier. “I love my country; it’s so beautiful,” he said. He spoke of a culture of collective care and hospitality, very different from what the United States currently offers. Americans, he said, “need to know about sharing. Because in America, people, they just say ‘mine.’ But [in Somalia], there’s no word for ‘mine.’ ”